Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

That Garden Master CD is at http://www.foodforeveryone.org/garden_master/ .
But I have some opinions, and it's not nice. Others may disagree of course.
For what it's worth here it is. 

Any garden planning program is going to leave you making all the decisions.
And those decisions are what makes or breaks your production. Another
problem is that gardening has never been an exact science. You can plug in
your area or zip code but frost dates are still a blind guess, as is trying
to plan a watering schedule in advance. Every gardener has to deal with the
unexpected. You can't program the weather, the soil, or the plant
varieties, and that's the basic problem with trying to computerize a
garden. 

Here's a sample from that website:
"If you grew a Mittleider garden last year, your beds will be easy to
re-make. Just apply Pre-Plant and Weekly Feed to the bed area, then till
them in, place strings on your stakes, and re-make the beds."

I have the old Mittleider book from the 1950s, Food For Everyone. Frankly,
it's a crock, and this CD is still stuck in the 1950s. Till, fertilize,
till, hoe, hoe, hoe those weeds. And fertilize some more. His book shows
endless tractor rows of fine looking vegetables without an evil weed in
sight. His method takes a lot of work and a lot of money. I hope we've
learned a little since then. He was a fence stradler, advocating organic
matter in the soil but drench it in chemical fertilizers. But then, very
few writers were pushing organic in the 1950s, and certainly weren't
promoting no-till, intensive planting, and mulch to control weeds and raise
production while cutting costs. 

They have a saying in the computer programming business, GIGO - "garbage
in, garbage out". A program is only as good as the human information and
assumptions that go into it. 

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 2/23/2007 at 11:26 AM Neil Inman wrote:

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